Her name is Lola - she self-Brazilians...

I'm not sure what we do to them, but eventually, all cats in our household run galloping towards madness.  We've had cats who spontaneously paralyze, suck on carpet and hiss at the doorbell.  Since we moved to the new house, Lola - sveltest of our felines - is now attempting to change breeds - she is licking herself hairless.

Evolution to Sphinx...

  I give her six more months... et... voila!!

Who needs psychedelic drugs...

... when you're in the midst of peri-menopause? They tell you about the sleep disturbances, the night sweats - all that great stuff - they don't tell you that your dreamscape will be a cross between Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson.

Last night, Inigo Montoya was waxing my bikini line before he replaced my kneecaps with silver plating.  To be fair - Inigo Montoya had been featured on the Mindy Project and I had watched an episode of Bones while I was on the treadmill.  It is possible I've been watching too much Netflix.

For years, I'd had no dream retention and now... TECHNICOLOR dreams.  In one night I can have 4 or 5 major dream excursions.  Hopping between murder mystery and house-shopping, archaeology and  extreme haircuts - usually accompanied by night sweats - blankets off - then the chills as the sweat cools, so in your dream you're now naked in front of your Grade 9 Geography class, with only post-its to cover your interesting bits.

I awake bearing a grudge against David because in one of my panic attack-inducing dreams there's a demon child who throws a patio door at me.  Trying to scream - only managing a whimper in my sleep - David 'there-there'ing me in his sleep, one arm curving around my midriff, patting me ineffectually when what I really need is to be able to climb inside of him so that he can keep me safe.

"You don't protect me," I say petulantly over breakfast.

"I was asleep!"

"You were awake enough to recognize that I was crying, you patted me, but then you just went back to sleep."

"Next time it happens, you have my permission to wake me up and make sure that I understand the gravity of your situation."

"Wake you up violently?"

"If need be."

I smile.  "You love me."

"Yeah."

"Enough to take an elbow to the gut?"

"Yeah."







  

The common cold - anti-aphrodisiac...

"Ooooh... naked body..." says David as we hop into the shower together.  He presses himself against me.

"Dude."

"What?"  He lathers me suggestively.

COUGH.  COUGH.  HACK.  WHEEZE.  spit.

He stops momentarily.  "You okay?"

"Oh yeah, I'm great.  Lung butter up to my clavical, but I'm good."

"You know what would make you feel better?"  Without seeing him, I know that his eyebrows are waggling with innuendo.

"Being able to take a full breath into my lungs?"

"Well yes, but..."

HACK.  COUGH.  COUGH.  spit.

"Not nearly vomiting when I cough?"

"Well that too..."

"Having enough energy to walk up the stairs?"

"Yeah..."

COUGH.  COUGH. sniff.

"What if I just toweled you..."

COUGH.  COUGH.  stagger.  spit. COUGH.  HACK.

"You're really not better yet, are you?

"What was your first clue?"  HORK.  spit.

If my breasts were 22, this wouldn't happen!

"Just one more?  Please can't we watch just one more?" I beg.

"No Mummy.  We've already watched three episodes.  You're done," says Rissa.

I look over to David forlornly.

He shrugs.  "The kid has spoken.  It's bedtime for Bonzo."

I throw myself across their laps, wailing in dissatisfaction.  They are unmoved.  As I am lying across their laps, I look down at my chest.  My breasts have caved in.

"What the?!?"  I struggle up and look down again, poking at my chest.  The girls are up where they belong.

I lie back down sideways across Rissa, my gaze now chestward.  Dents.  My breasts have DENTS!!!  The padded t-shirt bra cups are DENTED!!

"What are you doing?" Rissa asks.

"My boobs have dents," I say, poking at them.  I move back to sitting.  "See this?  No dents!"  I lie across Rissa once more.   poke, poke...  "Now?  DENTS!!!" 

My spouse and child do their best not to laugh, but are unsuccessful.

"Not funny, guys!  NOT FUNNY.  This means that I have floppy breasts.  FLOPPY BREASTS!!!" No longer wailing because they won't let me watch another Mindy Project, I am now wailing in narcissism.

"It's okay Mummy," says Rissa patting my arm.  "No one will know."

"I...  I will know!!  And your father, because he sleeps with me when I am naked.  "My breasts are DEFLATING!!!"

"They are not deflating," says David.  "They are..."

"Don't you dare say aging!"

"I wasn't..."

"Or ripening..."

"How about...?" 

"Or curing..."

"Transforming??"

"Into what exactly?"

"...soft pillowy... butterflies?"

"Okay, I can get on board with that."

My get up and go has f@¢#ed off... how do women survive middle-age?

On the plus side?  I'm 46 years old and still alive.   If this were the Middle Ages, I'd be dead already, or close to dead, or, at the very least, a great-Grandma, with incredibly saggy boobs because they didn't have proper brassieres back then.

On the minus side?  The part of my brain that is proactive, gives me moxie, lights a fire under my ass?  It's fucked off.  At present, I feel as though my picture could be placed beside the word apathetic in the dictionary.

Hey look over there, it's a pile of clothes that's needed to be ironed for the last 5 months... I should... meh...

I'm not saying that I was a 'get it done right now' gal - not like my friend Nathalie, who would buy something at a junk shop to turn into a chandelier and then the next day it would be spray-painted, wired and fucking lit up in her dining room - that wasn't me... but it didn't used to take me 10 frickin' months to hem a set of curtains. 

And although I know that I have a a couple of things working against me (thank you ever so much, thyroid disease and peri-menopause), on bad days, I am convinced that  I have morphed into a giant, corpulent, reticulated slug.

INT. JABBA'S LAIR

JABBA 

Have you met my sister? 
(cut to closeup of slightly younger female Hutt) 
She is renowned throughout the universe for her
excessive weight and sallow colour.

Checking out the back of my hair in the mirror, I have to quell the urge to self nip and tuck... "Okay, seriously??  How many rolls of back fat can a girl have surrounding her bra??"  Then you play the how can I look fine from the front, but utter shit from the back? game - rotating in front of the mirror like you're a car on a  pedestal revolve at an auto show.

I get home from work and it's all that I can do to walk over to the refrigerator to see if we have vegetables in the crisper.

I don't think my Mom went through all this shit. Yes, hot flashes - she flashed for years and years and years... but she didn't bitch out, she didn't crawl into bed at 8:00 p.m. and she sure as shit didn't resort to grilled cheese sandwiches with a side vegetable of pickles several times a week.  Oh, don't mind my daughter, the malnutrition will right itself when she's in university on a proper meal plan.

Overwhelmed is a constant.  I was at the grocery store on Saturday and found myself near tears in the canned goods aisle.  Too many people, too many colours, so much to consume...  How many children in the world can't have cereal?  What are they using to clean their floors?  That person has 17 items in the 16 item lane!!!  If I've been out in public, David generally meets me at the door with a cocktail.  He sits me down, wraps me in a blanket and stands guard for the emotional implosion. 

This hormonal shift is akin to when I was in adolescence - but now there's an added level of soul-crushing despair and self-loathing that I have to mask in front of the public.  Jazz hands Heather, keep up those jazz hands!

Big things?  They ain't happening.  It's time to refocus on the minutia of joy.   Tying on an apron to successfully finish cooking a meal that involves more than bread and cheese is a win.  And last night? I emptied the ironing basket - and not just by hiding it in a bag somewhere else in the house.  I dusted my bedside lamp, reorganized the face cloth basket, I mended a sweater of Rissa's that had been waiting for a year and a half.  By accomplishing  the seemingly inconsequential - I may just keep myself out of the nuthouse.

Why yes, this IS what middle-aged hair looks like...

"Heather, what do you want for... HOLY CRAP!!!" says David as he sticks his head behind the shower curtain.  He's reacting to the shower wall, upon which I have left all the 'extra' hair from my head.  And by 'extra' hair, I mean the hair that I regularly lose when I wash my hair. 

"Are you okay?" he asks, genuine concern in his voice.

I glance to the wall.   "Oh, this?"  I shrug.    "This is pretty much normal."  I scoop it up and offer it to him, a hamster-sized practical example of what happens when you're a middle-aged woman in peri-menopause with thyroid disease.  He shrinks back a titch.

"No, I think I'm good."

"By March Break we could make another ME - out of hair," I suggest.  "Which I will then sell to the AGO and become ridiculously wealthy and famous."

He nods mutely and backs away.

I go back to conditioning my hair.  I've never had silky, manageable hair.  My hair never bounced and behaved.  It has always been coarse and disorderly and then after I had kids, it went curly with the coarse and disorderly.  If I brush it out I resemble Rosanne Rosannadanna.

The incomparable Gilda Radner...

But on the plus side, I now feel an odd kinship with Pamela Anderson.  Although I'm less leather corset and more just barbed wire on my head.  Almost 30 years of hair dying and strangely my hair is... dry...   I've been hanging out in the alley behind the beauty shop...

"Psssssssst.... Hey... HEY!!!  Can you slip me some deep conditioner?"

I Google up on how to deep condition and apparently, I have to find another 15 minutes in my day to sit under a bonnet hair dryer with a plastic bag on my head allowing my hair to suck up moisture.

Wait a second!  I actually own a bonnet hair dryer!  And 15 minutes?  There's gotta be 15 minutes somewhere in my day!  And I'm supposed to sit during that 15 minutes?  That's a requirement?  Oh sweet Jesus, I could sit and read... an actual book!! Because you know, I 'd be trapped under the hair dryer and all...  I could have a book in one hand and a cocktail in the other!!!

If my hair weren't in such terrible shape, deep conditioning would make it greasy...  Because my hair is such crap, I will now be required to read and drink alcohol.  15 minutes??  Hell, I'll make it 30!   Watch out world!  My hair will soon be so smooth and soft that I will injure myself and others when I whip it around as I travel in my own imagined deep conditioning commercial.

Who let the dwarves into my uterus?!?

WARNING: There will be foul language in this post.

MOTHERFUCKING DWARVES.*  I'm sorry, but... REALLY...   REALLY?!?  I'm sure that the lining of my uterus is chock-a-block with rich mineral deposits which can be sold at a premium on the Disc World, but I would just like to state for the record that I did NOT give my permission for a team of mining dwarves to bring their motherfucking pick axes into my uterus to collect its bounty.

At the very least, the little rat bastards could give me a cut.  If the (WARNING: TMI) 2 and a half inch blood clot, which they apparently spent the entire night chipping away, is worth so fucking much - I deserve at least 75% of the take when they sell that fucker to the black market.

I am sure that peri-menopausal blood clots hold a certain cachet - maybe the sick twisted pricks who buy them from the motherfucking dwarves eat them à la placenta ingestion...  I don't give a cat's fragrant ass who is doing what with them, I just want my fucking cut.

There are a lot of us out there gals - if we unionize, I'm sure that we can negotiate a more than fair business contract.

2, 4, 6, 8 - OUR FEMALE BITS AREN'T YOURS TO TAKE!

WHAT DO WE WANT?  COMPENSATION!!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?  WE'LL FUCKING DECAPITATE YOU!! 

*I choose to go the Tolkien route - not the Disney route